Month: March 2017

The dissolution of the metaphysics of alienation isn’t a purely intellectual task. Its necessity is profoundly inscribed in the whole experience of present life.

Born alienated into this world, humanity is constituted as such to its very core. Technology is the word conceived to express this revelation: that humanity itself is both agent & product of abstract processes, & is so COMPULSIVELY. On this basis RESISTANCE & SUBVERSION obtain a meaning that is symbiotic & not merely relative, since emancipative potential stands in a fixed ratio to the fact of alienation. That the individual exercises no volition over the circumstances of its coming-into-being has, at least since Rimbaud, presented itself as a Cartesian “tragedy” of the highest order, when it hasn’t assumed the form of pure farce. How it lives, or that it lives, appears to it a separate question – yet existence itself, in the absence of a workable superstition to the contrary, remains “irredeemable.” Unwittingly, this is the acme of its optimism. To those who’ve dreamt of a self-emancipated Being illuminated by a burning barricade at night, philosophy proffers the compensating spectacle of a hermeneutics-without-end: “language games” with which to construct new myths on a moment-to-moment basis – a technocratic Kabbalah of “words for Being” to be muttered over the delicate homunculus as if even vaguely expecting it to live, awake, rise-up, assume humanity’s place in the world. Naïve hope? Existential horror? For what creates this abstract promise of resurrected matter in the form of an emancipation of the spirit, creates its “concrete unfreedom” also.